Features for theaters, music venues, festivals

Foyer comes with build in support for the Theater for WordPress plugin. With Theater & Foyer you can easily publish your events on your website, and showcase them on your onsite displays.

Slide formats

Default: Displays a background only.

Text: Displays some text.

Post: Displays title, date and content of a post, and optionally the featured image.

Event: Displays title and details of an event, with its featured image as default background (requires Theater for WordPress).

External web page: Displays a web page to your liking.

PDF: Creates a slide for each page in an uploaded PDF, displaying that page contained within the slide.

Slide backgrounds

Image: Displays an image, covering the entire slide background.

Video: Displays a YouTube video, or a specified fragment, as slide background.

More features, slide formats and slide backgrounds are coming soon.
Eg. uploaded video support, a Page slide, a Recent Posts slide stack, and multiple and recurring scheduled channels. Longer term goals include a widgets bar for displaying Time, Weather and other widgets.

Whenever 90% or more of all strings in the Development project (Development Readme translations do not count) are translated send me a message. I will make sure a language pack for your language will be created.

Donations

Donations are very welcome and help me dedicate more time to developing this plugin.

FAQ

There are currently no settings. Just go ahead and add slides, channels and displays.

How do I set up my slideshow on my digital sign?

In WordPress go to Slides and add some.

Go to Channels, add one, and add some of your slides.

Go to Displays, add one, and subscribe it to your channel.

Preview the display, note the URL (something like http://your.site/foyer/name-of-your-display), and load this page in the web browser of your digital sign.

Your digital sign will now display the channel it is subscribed to. If you change the channel for this display in WordPress, the digital sign will change with it. You can even schedule channels on displays.

Set up a display for each digital sign for maximum remote flexibility.

What hardware should I use for my digital sign?

Generally speaking you need a computer with a web browser and internet connection, and a display linked to that computer. A Smart TV with built in web browser might work, but maybe not as reliable.

I recommend using a (mini-)computer with the Chrome browser in kiosk mode, and a Full HD (1920 x 1080) display.

When setting up multiple digital signs with their own content, each display needs its own (mini-)computer.

Can I use a Raspberry Pi mini-computer for my digital sign?

Sure! Be aware that transitions and video playback on the Pi will be very choppy though, if they work at all. Use the ‘No transition’ setting for channels, don’t add videos, and your Raspberry Pi digital sign will be fine.

I can recommend installing the paid version of Raspberry Digital Signage as operating system on the SD card of a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. Just power up your Pi, enter the URL of your Foyer display when asked, and you’ll have an instant digital sign each time you power up.

Can I use an Android mini-computer or tablet for my digital sign?

Absolutely! Transitions and video playback should be smooth, of course depending on the hardware used. To set up your digital sign with the Chrome browser: Open your display URL in Chrome and tap ‘Add to Home screen’ from the Chrome menu. A shortcut will be added to your Home screen. When you launch this shortcut your display will be shown full screen.

You might want to use hardware that supports auto power-on after power outage. And you might want to use a Kiosk and Lockdown app, to make sure your display will launch when Android starts. And for tablets to make sure nobody can interact with the screen, and to avoid display sleep.

Landscape or portrait?

You choose! Install your digital sign the way you prefer. Foyer will follow. Slide templates are designed to work in both landscape and portrait mode. Only the background image will be cropped differently, of course.

Can I change the looks of slides?

Yes, this is possible if you know how to write CSS. Just include some CSS in the theme of your website that targets the slide HTML. If you don’t have access to the theme you can add some CSS using the WordPress Customizer.

Can I change the template of a slide format?

Yes, this is possible if you know how to write WordPress templates. Create a foyer/slides/ directory in your theme. Next locate the template of the slide format you want to change in the public/templates/slides/ directory in the Foyer plugin directory. Copy the template file to your foyer/slides/ directory, without changing the filename. You should find the template in your theme now overrules the template included with the plugin. Note that this plugin is still in its early stages of development. You might have to copy the latest version of the template file and reapply your changes when major changes to the plugin are released.

Can I add my own slide formats?

Yes, this is possible if you know how to write WordPress templates, and how to register PHP functions to WordPress plugin hooks. Have a look at how the plugin adds slide formats itself, in includes/class-foyer.php. More documentation for developers is coming soon.

The top/bottom or left/right part of my image is missing, why?

All images are displayed in a way that they fully cover the display. So if your display has a landscape orientation, and you upload an image with portrait orientation, the image will still cover the entire width of the display, which is great. But of course the top and bottom part of that image will not be visible. The greater the difference between the display orientation and the uploaded image orientation, the greater the top/bottom part or left/right part that will be invisble.

The plugin always displays the center-middle part of each image. So if the important part of your image is in the top part of the image, that might not be visible. You might have to crop that image before uploading and adding to a slide.

If you want to have full control you can always create and upload images that have the exact same orientation and proportions as your display. For most displays this is 1920×1080 pixels (landscape) or 1080×1920 (portrait). That way the images will be 100% visible.

My changes are not directly visible on my displays, what’s happening?

Changes to displays, channels and slides are never instantly visible on your digital signs. Each digital sign tries to contact your website every 5 minutes to see if you made any changes. If so and you changed the channel for a display, the new channel will be shown right after the slide that is currently being displayed. For any other changes, like adding slides, the new slides will be shown right after a full cycle of the slides that are currently being displayed.

Does Foyer work together with caching plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache?

Yes, but your cache settings might need some tweaking. Your display loads new content every 5 minutes. With page cache or browser cache enabled your display will not show the changes you made within 5 minutes but instead this might take hours. Make sure all cache layers are disabled for Foyer displays.

Settings for W3 Total Cache: Add /foyer/* on a new line under Performance > Page Cache > Never cache the following pages.

Reviews

Works flawlessly. We use it in our ticketing lobby for departure status, traveller information, partner advertising, and our cafe menu. Pair it with a good digital signage theme and you’ve got a complete digital signage solution that is very easy to set up and a breeze to maintain.

i m a it administrator and i use it to communicate our support times to our users. A 10 inch Android tablet hangs on our door. the plugin shows it-news and a lot of interessting stuff about it-infrastructure.

i think its a great plugin for reception rooms too. marketing departments will love this !

Fixed an issue where YouTube videos stopped playing after 5 minutes when page caching was enabled (1.5.1). Thanks Heinz for troubleshooting!

Fixed an issue where images on slides were over cropped, even when adding exact Full HD sizes (1.5.2).

Fixed a 404 Not Found issue when accessing a display on its pretty permalink in fresh Foyer installs (1.5.3).

Fixed an issue where slideshows would not continue to the next slide when the video of the current slide is not playing, eg. in case of prolonged network failure (1.5.5).

Fixed an issue where background images were not covering the entire slide, in Edge (1.5.5).

Fixed an issue where the rewrite rules are not flushed after plugin update, but a PHP Warning is thrown instead (1.5.6).

1.4

Release Date: February 14, 2018

Introduces a brand new way to build slides: choose a format, then a background. Now you can build event slides with video backgrounds. Or, coming up in a future release :-), WordPress Post slides on a background color.

1.3

Release Date: November 25, 2017

Introduces the External web page slide format. Displays a web page to your liking. This could be anything! A dashboard, a social media wall, a live feed, teletext!, .. anything that has its own URL.

Enhancements:

Made the PDF slide format processing work for WordPress < 4.7 (1.3.1).

Displays now only use channels that are published, and channels now only use slides that are published (so no draft or private or trashed slides) (1.3.2).

The Channel columns in the Display admin table now contain ‘None’ if no channel is set (1.3.2).

Major internal changes that no one should notice: Refactored all non-object classes to use static methods, and switched from using a central Foyer_Loader class to registering actions and filters directly from Foyer, Foyer_Admin and Foyer_Public classes (1.3.2).

Added a foyer-reset-display detection to JS, in anticipation of the 1.4.0 release that will need to be able to trigger it (1.3.3).

Bug fixes:

Fixed an issue where the uploaded image on an event slide was never displayed (1.3.1).

Fixed an issue introduced in 1.2.6 where the scheduled channel date time pickers no longer worked (1.3.1).

Fixed an issue introduced in 1.2.6 where the media library lightbox texts were no longer set (1.3.1).

Fixed an issue where the ‘External web page’ slide format displayed a border around the web page, depending on the theme and browser used (1.3.2).

Fixed an issue where the Landscape / Portrait buttons were not styled correctly, depending on the theme used (1.3.2).

Fixed a long unnoticed JS error that occurred while attempting loading new display data when no slide group was empty yet (1.3.3).

1.2

Release Date: April 12, 2017

Introduces the Video slide format. Displays a specified fragment of a YouTube video.